


The Girl Who Fell

by Sab



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Defining Moment Vignette Challenge, Drabble, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-07-25
Updated: 2002-07-25
Packaged: 2017-10-02 08:44:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sab/pseuds/Sab
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I cannot have an aide who is forever looking down."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Girl Who Fell

Nine hundred eighty six cycles after the age of Valen, less than a decade before the next great war would change the shape of the galaxy forever, when the chill of winter had just begun to bite at the crystal borders of Ilivenn and the sky was striped with grey, a child of the first Fain of Dobrosh -- not a child, a woman, really, in her seventeenth year, a woman named Delenn, of the Religious Caste, of the Onamakir Clan, stepped off a moving staircase, caught a toe in the hem of her robe, tripped, and fell flat on her face.

The other acolytes moved past her through the corridor, floating in their robes, while Draal walked backwards and talked about architecture. Just a furrow in his brow suggested that he might have noticed Delenn, but if he did he ignored her, and the class turned the corner and disappeared in an echo of murmuring voices into the bowels of the library. The girl Delenn put a hand to her chin and came away with blood.

"Handkerchief?" A man knelt beside her, daubed at her jaw with a cloth.

"Thank you," the girl said. The man was dressed in the robes of the religious, scuffed sandals, no collar. She took him to be someone's father, come to visit his child away at school, come to see how she's done as an acolyte. Delenn smiled.

"Your class seems to have gone on without you," the man said. "Will you be missed?"

She found a wry smile, and her chin hurt. "I wouldn't know architecture if it crawled across the floor and bit me," she said. "I am confident this lecture would do little to change that. I fear I am most inept."

"Architecture," the man said. "A form of art put here, if I may, to trip us up and make us fall on our faces?"

Delenn laughed, a lyrical giggle, pulled herself up to her feet. "It is fortunate for me, then, that it is not among the required arts in the acolyte program. Or else, I fear, I might never graduate."

"You're to be a priest then?" the man's eyes widened, but was he ironic or impressed?

"My duty is to serve my people," the girl recited, wiggling her aching jaw.

"Nothing more, nothing less," the man nodded. "How very decent of you. How extremely unremarkable."

Delenn clenched her jaw, because it was not appropriate to argue. "I am good at what I do," she said at last.

"And what about what you don't do?" he asked. "What if that is what's required, to serve your people? Are you good at that?"

"I have to get back to my lecture," the girl said.

"Yes, do that," the man said. "Keep the handkerchief. And when you return to class, tell Satai Draal he was wrong, you are not Entil'zha. Tell him Dukhat says he was wrong about you." And with that, the man called Dukhat turned away and left.


End file.
